9

Cisgender – Living in the Gender

Assigned at Birth
Ester McGeeney and Laura Harvey

Introduction

Hardly a day goes by without a headline about ‘fundamental’ differences

between men and women. Self-help books claim that men and women are
from different planets, and we are surrounded by often contradictory repre-
sentations of what it means to be a ‘normal’ man, woman, boy, girl. How can
psychology help us make sense of these debates, and understand social norms
of masculinity and femininity?
Much mainstream psychological research has taken as its starting point a
gender binary, in which male/female and masculinity/femininity are opposing
poles. The persistence of this gender binary, including in popular and medical
Western discourse, is such that the birth of a baby, or the announcement of
pregnancy, is still so often accompanied by the question “Is it a boy or a girl?”
This chapter will explore psychological approaches that have examined the
experiences, identities, and behaviours of people who stay in the gender they
are assigned at birth (cisgender). We will ask how psychologists understand
the relationship between gender, biology and society, and discuss the differ-
ent methods researchers have employed to investigate cisgender. The chapter
begins by outlining the emergence of key theoretical debates in psychological
research and exploring recent critical approaches to the relationship between
gender, the body, and the social world. In the final section we consider the
implications of these historically situated debates for practitioners working with
cisgender young people and adults.
Most of the psychological work we explore in this chapter was conducted
before the term ‘cisgender’ came into usage in the mid-1990s. While the term
is becoming more commonplace, its explicit use is still not widespread in con-
temporary gender scholarship (Ansara & Hegarty, 2012). We therefore draw on
research that does not explicitly define cisgender as its topic of analysis, yet

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C. Richards et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Psychology of Sexuality and Gender
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2015
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implicitly focuses on cisgender experiences, identities, or norms. We would

argue that, despite differences in definition, the insights from this research are
crucial in making sense of psychological understandings of cisgender. While
the focus of the research discussed below is on the experiences of cisgender
people, much of this will also have relevance for trans* people who identify as
men or women.

Key definitions

In everyday language, the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are often used interchange-
ably; we may be asked about the ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ of an unborn baby or asked
to indicate on official documents what our own ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ is. Feminist
activists and scholars have sought to distinguish between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’,
emphasising that ‘gender’ refers to social norms and inequalities rather than
innate biological characteristics (Crawford, 2012; Oakley, 1985[1972]). ‘Sex’
therefore is a word that refers to the biological differences between male and
female: the visible difference in genitalia and the related difference in procre-
ative function. ‘Gender’, however, is a matter of culture: it refers to the social
classification into ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ (Oakley, 1985[1972], p. 16).
This distinction has been subject to intense debate, with many feminists
arguing that sex can also be understood as a socially constructed category
(Butler, 1993). While some position biological characteristics like hormones,
chromosomes, and genitalia as inherently ‘male’ or ‘female’, theorists like
Butler argue that these are socially produced norms.
The term ‘cisgender’ has its roots in the campaign for recognition and rights
for trans* people. The category of cisgender challenges the representation of
cisgender as a universal norm, presenting it instead as one of many possi-
bilities for gender identification. Although the term remains contested, it is
increasingly used in academic as well as activist and popular spaces.

History

Psychologists from different theoretical backgrounds, using a range of method-

ological approaches, have investigated whether, why and how differences
between humans can be attributed to their gender. Topics as diverse as brain
size, hormones, parental interaction, genetics, attitudes, playground behaviour,
and language have all come under the attention of psychologists seeking
to make sense of cisgender and the differences between cisgender women
and men. Even where gender is not the explicit focus of psychological
research, it has become commonplace for psychologists to include binary gen-
der as a demographic variable and analyse the results accordingly (Johnson &
Repta, 2012).